Berriman Biomechanics
Berriman Biomechanics was a large-scale corporation specializing in the fields of bio-engineering and genetic engineering, specifically in the field of military-applicable sciences. In 2066, following the start of the Sino-American War with the invasion of Alaska by China, the United States government contracted the group to run large-scale genetic and biological experimentation, leading to bold claims of a "fishman" project being started in late 2069. The corporation, like many others contracted by the US government, ran these experiments out of clandestine facilities, most notably that of the Louisiana laboratories near the small town of Ewing Bay, on the coast of Vermillion Bay, built out of a previously abandoned cotton mill. As with most other corporations in America, it was rendered defunct following the Great War, with their "fishman" project yielding fascinating results in the generations and years following the nuclear exchange. History Originally founded in 2024 by Lohmer Kripps, a German immigrant with former ties to his country's own genetic and biological engineering efforts, as a joint partnership between him and the then prominent geneticist, Stuart Berriman. The corporation was generously subsidized in part by the US government, keen to have both Kripps and Berriman on hand in the ensuing arms race that the rest of the world was now in with the US as a way of tipping the scales in their favor. Despite these generous subsidies, however, Berriman Biomechanics earliest works were instead intended for the civilian market, with little to no real military applications; chemical therapies in the treatment of cancers, store-brand pharmaceuticals that, whilst nowhere near as popular as Med-Tek's own branded medicines, were cheaper and sold at a fairly profitable pace, and even beauty products such as wrinkle cream and "natural" hair dyes. This wide assortment of products was intended, at least by Kripps, to relieve the corporation of it's reliance on US subsidies, specifically military ones. Nevertheless, the corporation still ran projects for the US government, sometimes in joint partnership with their rivals as per particularly demanding contracts. Most of these projects were related more to genetic and biological experimentation that had no relation to the FEV experiments carried out by other contract holders and the US government's agencies, for a very good reason; Berriman was largely refused it's own requests to garner any FEV samples for themselves, with the US government completely unmovable on the issue, and would instead have to rely on its own forms of experimentation, something that both the original founders grew to resent the US government for, believing that these actions were undertaken by the bureaucrats in the government simply to spite their corporation in the face of larger, more prominent corporations at the US government's beck and call. In the face of this perceived slight, Berriman Biomechanics instead focused exclusively on civilian products and it's own experimentation, funded mostly by their own private shareholders; experiments were largely conducted on animals in inner city locations, with scientists in the employ of Berriman attempting to perfect genetic splicing; for the most part, these attempts were indeed successful, though more often than led to abominations that were often disposed in incinerators; rabbits left hairless and limbless, physically unable to move, through testing on the parents were just the start of the rabbit-hole of genetic engineering, no pun intended. Even experiments on humans, though relatively few and far between, took place; mostly on convicts "donated" by federal law enforcement and homeless vagabonds paid generously in advance; these experiments throughout the 2040s did bring promising results, albeit with a mortality rate of 79% to be expected as an average; scientists nevertheless picked up useful information from these studies; information that would be later used to further the corporation's profit margins and the US' growing desire for global hegemony. In mid 2052, a mere 27 years into the company's founding, the Resource Wars began in earnest; bitter fighting in the Middle East was broadcast into the homes of American citizens and fears began to inspire further investment in the defence industry; all manner of weapons were snapped up by the Department of Defense in it's quest for further military power in an era of total pandemonium on a world scale, with diminishing world-wide resources being hoarded by all manner of nations across the globe. One such area of increased investment was that of the genetic and biological research fields; Berriman being one of the first contacts. Initially, however, Berriman's first contract with the US government was not that of their specialized field, namely genetic manipulation and biological tampering, but instead the creation of various chemical compounds to be utilized by the US Armed Forces personnel now largely on a heightened sense of alert as the chaos in the Middle East rippled across continents throughout the 2050s. Despite lobbying, the prospective bio-engineering firm was turned down numerous times to operate its own special projects, for which it had spent the years prior to the 2050s perfecting to an art form, with the odd corrupt law enforcement agency allowing experimentation on "volunteered" convicts and political dissidents, mostly regarded to the adaptation of genes not normally found in the human body, such as Bioluminescense, to the human genome, with some limited success in these endeavours mostly leaving horrifically deformed human beings in their wake; not until the invasion of Alaska in 2066 would these requests be listened to. With this development, government contracts were thrown around like confetti; a generous amount of those related to bio-organic and chemical weaponry being handed to the likes of Berriman. It's very first experiments, conducted in that very same year, at first revolved around the genetic manipulation of animals; these experiments, though leading to interesting results, were not what the Department of Defense clamoured for; rather, a super-soldier programme of sorts was what they felt would be both a useful military asset in the now fresh war with China and a very effective propaganda tool. FEV had yielded fairly disappointing results for the US government, whereas Berriman's own experimental methods had yielded surprisingly useful adaptations to a good 50% of it's own tests on animals; naturally, this was translated to mean that experiments on human test subjects would be as equally successful. Thus, Berriman was given it's first batch of newly-arrested political dissidents; notably, Communist sympathisers and Chinese-Americans, as well as the odd condemned criminal. Around this time also began an attempted exposé by a reporter of Galaxy News Network; this would culminate in perhaps the last tragic act of the oncoming horrors that Berriman Biomechanics would create in it's quest for perfection. With this influx of new, human test subjects, nominally for free, Berriman's board and the now aging Kripps and Berriman drew up a plan for what was, essentially, intended to be an almost super-human replacement for divers; an imaginatively drawn up, though not imaginatively named, "fishman" project; this was to involve developing useful fish-like appendages on humans, namely gills, fins, enhancing strength and developing superior, ingrained fighting techniques that could, as was hoped, be programmed into these creature's brains. Of course, most of this was over-optimistic in the extreme, and promises were made to the US government that many scientists, Kripps himself included, argued were impossible; never the less, such promises were greatly received and became expected results. Human testing naturally began very quickly, around early 2067. For the first five years the project moved along with relative success and mild failure; mild meaning the usual plethora of deaths, test subjects more often than not suffering horrific torment as genetic manipulation and bioengineering, namely the slight increase of muscle-mass and odd change to airway sizes and widths, alongside adaptation to other, rather unspecified requirements , not to mention the odd bit of surgery, left them almost begging for death. Of course, some successes did come along quite early on; for instance, successful implementation of webbed feet was an easily enough achieved goal; the implementation of successfully working gills, which did not cause test subjects to suffocate as their natural airways closed gradually and painfully, was a far harder thing; nevertheless, by late 2069, with a death toll of test subjects notably high, the first success of a functional set of gills, working alongside the usual orifices, was achieved, though this process only worked for, at most, a meagre 2 hours before a demand for "pure" oxygen became overwhelming. Increased strength and muscle-mass was a process also notably easy to achieve; steroidal substances that had once been ruled out for civilian consumption, notably for fears of lawsuits, were now pumped willy-nilly into test subjects; this often led, as per usual, to test subject casualties, with heart-attacks a common cause for the numerous fatalities; nevertheless, these experiments too resulted in success within the first few months of 2070. With the first generation of successful test subjects scattered in laboratories in New York and the District of Columbia the decision was taken to purchase property from which to centralise and better co-ordinate further experimentation from; namely that of a long-abandoned Louisiana cotton mill, located a few miles away from a relatively unimportant, and rather seedy, town by the name of Ewing Bay. Renovations were ongoing from early 2070 to late 2070, whereupon most of the said renovations were complete and all that remained was the inclusion of further lab space beneath the structure itself. With the permission of the US government, not to mention complicity of local officials, unmarked vans and trucks drove test subjects, kept lucid and docile by a mix of narcotics and beatings, to this newly functional facility, whereupon the first generation of "fishmen" were set to be improved upon in further rounds of testing and experimentation; successful breeding of a second generation that adequately carried over these "improvements" was paramount ahead of all other requirements for the program to be considered a success, with a flood of positive spin on the project being poured into every Washington bureaucrat's ear - minus the continuing attempts at an exposé by Galaxy News Network's own reporters, who by now had already been discovered by Berriman; however, rather than revealing them and expelling them, the corporation found a very effective method of obfuscating the truth; namely, bribery. All but one of the GNN reporters took their bribes; this troublesome reporter was, for the most part, permitted to continue with her investigations unhindered, not aware of her cover having been destroyed; for the time being, she would be given a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. By 2071 forced breeding, either through artificial or natural insemination means, had led to numerous successful childbirths amongst the female minority of the "fishman" program. This second generation of children, by around 2073, could and were considered to be an ultimate success; they had the look of everything the company's board had requested, replete with aforementioned gills and webbed feet of their fathers and mothers of the first generation, now largely kept around as drugged up and docile, not to mention brain-dead, fore-bearers to this most unnatural of creations. The children were often shown off to visiting officials, usually within water-filled test chambers, as examples of the successful conclusion of the program; though these demonstrations were more often than carried out behind armoured glass. These children, now only toddlers, were practically feral; having learned what little behaviours from their parents were on show and adapted these behaviours to the more often than not abusive and tyrannical beatings of their captors. As 2073 drew to a close and 2074 began, with pats on the back for those influential scientists involved with the experiments, and the odd wining-and-dining of influential political personas in New York and Washington by Kripps and Berriman themselves, Berriman board members began to draw up plans to create a third generation of "improved" mutants of the "fishman" program; talk of even newer programs was also on the tips of many board member's tongues, though these aspirations were shoved aside as the ongoing, crushing successes of the US military on Chinese soil continued. The years passed quickly as US government contracts continued to pour out and ideas flooded the Berriman Biomechanic's boardroom; all of it of a morally questionable nature. The children of Berriman's first experiment into human genetics and bio-engineering had grown increasingly feral and violent towards their captors; some workers had lost fingers to these children. Keen to keep this populace in line, plans were drawn up to breed yet another generation artificially and dispose of the failed first generation and the now rabid second; unfortunately, at least for the corporation, this was not to be. On the morning of October 20th 2077, the final un-bribed reporter of GNN, realising that she had been fed a false tale into the true extent of the experimentation, attempted to release what information.pertaining to human experimentation she had managed to uncover; panicking Berriman Biomechanics scientists thus had hired company hands eliminate said reporter as she attempted to contact her handlers; a quick cash bribe to local law enforcement and frantic calls to the Defense Intelligence Agency covered up the potentially disastrous leak quickly; for the time being, it seemed, a potentially disastrous event had been averted, at the cost of a delay in their efforts. Whilst frustrating, this was not considered a problem; the delayed extermination of the first generation species and the start of research into a third was merely a minor setback in the minds of many of the company's board; naturally, their optimistic reports in the progress of their research placed further efforts back as far as November. With this minor setback in mind, many of the company's scientists relaxed and prepared for the next bout of testing in regards to further testing. On October 23rd, 2077, the stormclouds of nuclear war gathered over the United States. As missiles rained from the sky, destroying their targets across the United States with extremely brutal force, the founders of one of the many corporations that had created horrors that before the war were never talked of in polite society were now systematically reduced to nothingness within a matter of hours; Stuart Berriman and Lohmer Kripps died quick deaths in Washington, vaporized by the nuclear strikes; other scientists in New York and Washington were killed either similarly quickly or died painful deaths in the ensuing chaos; some died of radiation poisoning in the years after and fewer still became Ghouls, wandering in tattered lab-coats across the ruins of once bustling cities or empty plains where grassy fields once grew. Berriman Biomechanic's laboratory in Louisiana was lost within a month of these catastrophic events; most scientists and staff abandoned the lab, with those staying falling prey to either radiation or their own creations; the "fishmen" broke free of their confines and savaged their former tormentors; both first generation and second generation alike, the former now freed from the mental restraints of their drugs which had ravaged their minds, leaving them particularly violent and brutal with the last shreds of their intelligence gone. These new mutants proceeded to flee their newly abandoned former "home" for the newer, more brutal world of post-war America, now rapidly descending into chaos. In the years following, they would go on to form tribal communities, in the decades following the Great War these mutants would go on to be called Water Tribals, for their odd abilities and appearances, forming their own groups and communities and gathering in tribes all along Vermillion Bay's coast; these descendants would be one of the few people in the post-war US to remember Berriman Biomechanics, not for what is was, but for what it did; not for the better, but for the worst. Key Personnel *'Stuart Berriman:' Chief Executive Officer *'Lohmer Kripps:' Assistant Chief Executive Officer, Acting Chief Scientist of National Operations *'Dr. Lauren Stein:' Chief Scientist of Louisiana Regional Laboratories & Operations *'Dr. Parker Krauss:' Head Geneticist, Louisiana Laboratories *'Laura Palmer:' GNN lead undercover journalist into Berriman Biomechanics. Holotapes of Note Holotape 01; "Where's our test subject shipment?" ' God dammit, is this thing on.. Ah, good, it is, right.. Ah, Lauren, it's Krauss. I know you've been on my back about getting some work done in this hole but frankly this isn't my fault. You need to give me test subjects to get some actual fucking work done. How in the name of god do you expect me, a geneticist, to begin some genetic experimentation without any genetic samples? ' Jesus, Lauren, I'm not pissed with you; I'm just pissed with management. All of this; it's new territory for me - don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna go all "boo-hoo, ban the bomb" Hopeville hippie on you, but I'm genuinely concerned about where this could lead to; fucking with rabbits is one thing - experimenting on Humans is entirely another thing. Y'know what, screw it. We'll talk this over next week; I know a pretty good burger joint. That is, uh, if the whole fancy New Yorker lifestyle hasn't got you addicted to that European stuff. ' Holotape 02; "Feral Kids." ' Fuck, Krauss, I know your swanning off with that Lauren bitch; open secret that you've been giving her a demonstration of your "beside manner" but frankly I'm not sending you this just to backbite. I'm here to tell you that those fucking kids are feral. Christ, one of 'em bit the top off some lass' thumb just last night when she went in there to talk to the little fucker - I did warn her, but that loopy broad decided to go in anyways. Good thing she's a shrieker, otherwise that little shit might've done a lot more dam - '' '' God dammit, really? ' Fuck, fine - Krauss, I'll send you this now. That little bastard's got out of his containment cell; it'll be sorted by the time I'm done with that little fucker; won't have any more teeth after this. Pritchard, out. ' Gallery Berriman Biomechanics Laboratory.png|Berriman Biomechanics' Louisiana Laboratories. Berriman Biomechanics Laboratory Lobby.png|Berriman Biomechanics' Louisiana Laboratories' Lobby. Berriman Biomechanics Laboratory Office.png|Berriman Biomechanics' Louisiana Laboratories' Offices. Category:Pre-War Group Category:Pre-War Tech Category:Defunct